Saturday, March 17, 2012

John Mashey has a thorough and sad rendition of the whitewashing done by George Mason University to protect a tenured, climate denialist professor from the consequences of plagiarism. After receiving complaints, GMU found plagiarism existed in one case where an outside journal had already reached that conclusion and forced retraction of an article. In another case where no outsider had made a decision, GMU not only found no plagiarism but found "no misconduct," even though less of the same copied material was in the second case, the infamous "Wegman Report" to Congress that criticized climatologists.

Deep Climate has an update that the plagiarized material, also found in other material by GMU academics affiliated with Wegman, has been cleaned up with little explanation and no admission of error. DC doesn't speculate much on the motive for doing it but I will - it's the copyright, stupid.

Copyright and plagiarism violations are not the same but overlap greatly. Copyright is a legal property right, enforceable in court, to one's way of expressing ideas. Plagiarism is an ethical concept, usually not enforceable in court, that authors' ideas must be attributed to them when others use those ideas. Plagiarism is about the ideas, copyright is only about the way the ideas are expressed.

Plagiarism is generally a much broader concept because you can change the way of expressing the ideas and no longer violate copyright but still plagiarize if the new expression is done without attribution. In a Venn diagram, plagiarism is a big circle, copyright is a small circle, and all of the small circle sits within the big circle except for a tiny little bit sticking out.*

The legal relevance of this is that a strong culture at a university against plagiarism also protects against copyright violations, and outside publishers will know that submissions by academics are less likely to have stolen text that will blow up at some later point in a lawsuit against the publisher. After reviewing the color-coded material that John provides in the pdf at the bottom of the first link, I think the copyright violation is obvious (and because it's unattributed, it's obviously plagiarism) but GMU considers it to be no misconduct, i.e. an acceptable way to do scholarship.

The best that outside journals and publishing houses can hope for is that GMU is just demonstrating rank hypocrisy for one especially-favored professor and his PhD students, and that won't happen again for him, his students, or anyone else at GMU. But can they count on that? GMU has very publicly found that this level of copyright violation isn't misconduct in this case, so it will be much harder for it to make the contrary claim about violations by other academics and students. Wegman and the others involved in this will find it almost impossible to enforce against plagiarism themselves - I can't imagine the level of wikipedia copying that will go in papers in his classes.

The
ramification of the committee’s finding of no misconduct therefore includes the
risk that GMU will not have a culture that reduces copyright violations
in submissions by GMU scholars to outside journals and publishing houses. Those outside publishers will have to weigh
the increased legal risk of publishing a GMU scholar, knowing that competing authors submitting from other
universities come from academic cultures that have undertaken steps to minimize copyright violations. Not only would publishers become more vulnerable to lawsuits, they might be unable protect their publication of GMU academic work from copyright theft (because the author never owned the material while
claiming otherwise). The publishers
might even mistakenly bring a copyright claim against another outside author,
only to find that author, and not the publisher, owns the publisher’s material
that the publisher claimed was stolen.

John speculates on page 28 of his pdf as to why GMU did this. Here I'm speculating on legal consequences - DeepClimate has shown that others have already started to clean up material, which I think was done to limit copyright violations (it doesn't eliminate the legal harm already done, however).** Things could turn out worse for those publishers, and the implication to publishers in general is that they assign increased legal risk to material from GMU academics.

-----------------------------------
*The theoretical exception, where you can commit copyright violation without plagiarism, is by copying extensive material from the original author while clearly attributing the copied material to the original. As a practical matter, outside of overt piracy this is unimportant because the potential copyright violation sticks out like a sore thumb and alerts reviewers to the problem.

**Much of the material was also copied from Wikipedia, which maintains no copyright to its work (UPDATE: maintains limited copyright only, see comments). This distinction makes no difference as to plagiarism however. You can still do a thought experiment: 1. if wiki had copyrighted the material, 2. if sufficient amount was copied verbatim, and 3. if inadequate attribution, then you've established plagiarism.

19 comments:

John Mashey
said...

I do wonder about the precedent, not just for Wegman, but for GMU students in general. I think GMU has essentially declared non-existence of plagiarism, i.e., copy-paste-and trivial-edit is good enough, at least for professors.

Speaking of copyright, how did Dr. Richard S. Lindzen manage to agree with the Energy & Environmentauthor's instructions for submission of manuscripts when he submitted his article "A Case Against Precipitous Climate Action" for publication there?

The article in question begins:

The notion of a static, unchanging climate is foreign to the history of the earth or any other planet with a fluid envelope. The fact that the developed world went into hysterics over changes in global mean temperature anomaly of a few tenths of a degree will astound future generations. Such hysteria simply represents the scientific illiteracy of much of the public, the susceptibility of the public to the substitution of repetition for truth, and the exploitation of these weaknesses by politicians, environmental promoters, and, after 20 years of media drum beating, many others as well.

In July 2009 Professor Lindzen published in Quadrant Online an article seemingly identical to what was later published in E&E:

The notion of a static, unchanging climate is foreign to the history of the earth or any other planet with a fluid envelope. The fact that the developed world went into hysterics over changes in global mean temperature anomaly of a few tenths of a degree will astound future generations. Such hysteria simply represents the scientific illiteracy of much of the public, the susceptibility of the public to the substitution of repetition for truth, and the exploitation of these weaknesses by politicians, environmental promoters,and,after 20 years of media drum beating, many others as well.

The same article appears in at least two other public venues prior to its acceptance by E&E.

The publisher of Energy & Environment offers the following guidance for authors submitting to the journal:

Acceptance for publication is subject to the manuscript being an unpublished work. Submission of a manuscript is taken to imply that it is not being considered for publication elsewhere. Submission and acceptance of a paper implies the transfer of copyright to Multi-Science.

So what's the deal with copyright? Did Dr. Lindzen get an agreement from the other publications releasing their copyright interest? Did E&E agree to waive their normal policy on copyright assignment?

I wouldn't say that Wikipedia maintains no copyrights, exactly. The contributions from editors (i.e. the articles, the pictures, the audio clips, basically everything you care about and everything Wegman and Said plagiarized) are dual licensed under a Creative Commons license variant and also a modified version of the GNU Free Document License, assuming the content is not already public domain. Both of the licenses require attribution, among other things. Using the material without proper attribution is probably grounds for copyright violation. The Wiki page on their copyright policies includes instructions for re-use of text that mandate attribution, copylefting of the resulting work, indications of changes made to the texts, and licensing notices. None of this was present in the Wegman report or the papers that used Wikipedia material. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights#Reusers.27_rights_and_obligations Who wants to notify GMU and Wiley?

Eli, self-plagiarism is very common also among the non-diseased. There is a widespread belief that if you wrote it yourself, you may copy it as many times as you like. You'll find it especially in introductory sections, where it is perhaps less questionable as there is no implied claim of originality.

Still it's a stretch to imagine that faculty at GMU and around the country are just waiting for a green light from their universities to plagiarize. I want my articles to be apprediated by colleagues for their important findings and original ideas. I would rather have fewer good publications than a lot of redundant, useless ones. Reputations are more built on important papers that the number of publications. Quality is a big factor and one's peers understand quality. I'm not sure about student papers at GMU. Probably most students do not know about the Wegman affair, by maybe they do.

"I do wonder about the precedent, not just for Wegman, but for GMU students in general. I think GMU has essentially declared non-existence of plagiarism, i.e., copy-paste-and trivial-edit is good enough, at least for professors."

echoes something that I've been idly wondering, but which seems less implausible the more I think about it...

I wonder who will be the first GMU student to submit a report or an essay based largely (or perhaps even soley) on extracts of Wegman's prior work - and to do so without being failed for doing it?

The plagiarism is so obvious that Eli chose not to do a compare/contrast. Pathetic.

@John Mashey

"I do wonder about the precedent, not just for Wegman, but for GMU students in general. I think GMU has essentially declared non-existence of plagiarism, i.e., copy-paste-and trivial-edit is good enough, at least for professors."

Yes and that's the same thing Harvard did for Elena Kagan. She was promoted and is now a Supreme Court justice. Please start calling it both ways, Mashey. Nobody likes a double standard.

Methinks the Rabbett is expressing "fox surprise" at an academic committee behaving in a toothless and feckless manner in policing one of its own. You'll find lots of hares to pull with the other side on that one. And shock at the idea of students copying Wikipediwit directly into their papers? We hardly think of the Rabbett being a Luddite (or even an Elmer Fuddite) who pretends that this kind of thing isn't pervasive, sad as it is to say.

"oherec"Note that this post was written by Brian Schmidt, a lawyer, not an academic. [It would be nice if the author appeared prominently at top of post, rather than subtly at end.]

Nobody is surprised that students copy Wikipedia. Many academics are astonished to find copy-paste-trivial-edit done by professors, especially when they do it massively in articles they wrote for a journal they edit, i.e., the Wegman+Said Wiley case. has anyone ever heard of anything like that?

Note that sometimes people get sloppy and forget to quote, but trivial edits don't happen spontaneously.

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Eli Rabett

Eli Rabett is a not quite failed professorial techno-bunny, a chair election from retirement, at a wanna be research university that has a lot to be proud of but has swallowed the Kool-Aid. The students are naive but great and the administrators vary day-to-day between homicidal and delusional. His colleagues are smart, but they have a curious inability to see the holes that they dig for themselves. Prof. Rabett is thankful that they occasionally heed his pointing out the implications of the various enthusiasms that rattle around the department and school. Ms. Rabett is thankful that Prof. Rabett occasionally heeds her pointing out that he is nuts.